A new robotics venture from Travis Kalanick is aiming to expand into multiple industrial sectors. The former Uber founder has introduced Atoms, a company focused on robotics that plans to operate in the food, mining, and transportation industries, according to details on its website.
Kalanick is merging his existing ghost kitchen business, CloudKitchens, into the newly formed Atoms. However, it is not yet clear how the company intends to enter the mining and transportation sectors. The Atoms website says the company will develop a “wheelbase for robots.” In a live interview on Friday, Kalanick explained that the wheelbase will power “specialized robots” rather than humanoid machines.
“Humanoids have their place, but there’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play,” he said.
To strengthen the mining segment, Kalanick said he is close to acquiring Pronto, a startup focused on autonomous vehicles for industrial and mining sites. The company was founded by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick also revealed that he is already the “largest investor” in Pronto.
“The industrial thing is sort of like, probably, our main jam,” Kalanick told media. He also downplayed the idea of using Atoms robots to transport people in the near future. “Once you crack movement in the physical world, there’s lots of people who want access to that.”
Earlier on Friday, a technology publication reported that Kalanick was returning to the self-driving vehicle space with “major backing” from Uber. The report said he has told people he “wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo.” Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the Atoms website does not mention the company.
The same report earlier revealed that Kalanick was in talks to acquire Pronto. It also noted that last year he explored buying the U.S. unit of Chinese autonomous vehicle company Pony AI with Uber’s backing, but those discussions eventually ended.
Kalanick stepped down from Uber in 2017 following a series of crises at the company. Before leaving Uber, Kalanick had launched a self-driving vehicle division in 2015. Levandowski played a major role in the project after being recruited from Google. Uber was later sued by Google for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to its autonomous driving project, which eventually became Waymo. The companies later reached a settlement.
Levandowski was criminally charged and sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in the case. He later received a last-minute pardon from Donald Trump at the end of his first term.
Uber continued working on self-driving technology after Kalanick’s departure, even after one of its test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in 2018. His successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, eventually shut down and sold the division to autonomous trucking company Aurora in 2020.
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